Facebook has dominated the social media scene in India for the entire 2011 with now over 41 million Indian Facebook users, which is >50% penetration of India’s online population.
63% of Facebook users from India are <24 years old!
73% of Facebook users from India are male!
Facebook also dominates the referral traffic generation in India. To know more, click here.
Youth continue to dominate Internet usage in India with more than 75% of Internet users being youngsters that include Young men (27%), School and College going students (48%).
Interestingly, its the School Going kids who have started using internet more than they’ve ever had in the past decade.
While this growth is attributed by some to the increase in e-learning services and school assignments being posted online, our contention is that this generation of children were born into homes (most urban Indian households) that already owned computers.
As of September 2011, there will be 112 million claimed Internet users: 88 million from urban cities and 24 million from rural villages. This implies a growth of around 13% from last year.
Metros vs. Non-metros, Internet Usage, March 2011
By December 2011, it is expected that there will be 121 million claimed Internet users in India. Of these, 80% are active internet users (i.e., using the Internet at least once a month.
The top 8 metros contibuting 28.5 million internet users in total are – Mumbai, Delhi+ NCR, Kolkatta, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Pune.
However, what is interesting is that smaller towns and non-metros put together contribute more than 30 million internet users in India.
The biggest question brands are asking today is - WHAT Do I Measure?
Sorry, there is no one-size-fits-all answer here. What you measure is entirely dependent on a thorough understanding of the Social Media Landscape in your region, but more importantly, it depends on the goals and objectives you set for your business or brand in the social media/ digital space.
Here are some examples of how Measurement is related to Objectives:
Not every metric applies to every brand or situation. And it is pointless trying to measure all factors unless they help you see if your objectives are being met. My recommendation for brands is to set clear objectives for their social media presence or campaigns and then select 5 concrete metrics that are relevant to your objectives. Since Social Media Research is not an established field, you can create your own metrics that track the progress of your brand in this innovative space and give you some idea of where you stand viz. competition.
75% people in India still have trust in traditional forms of advertising but trust in consumer opinions posted online is almost on par at 74%. Personal recommendations and editorial content remain the most trusted (90%~). Globally the picture has already changed with consumer opinions posted online much ahead of traditional ads in terms of consumer trust and presumably India will soon go the same way.
Although brand websites score highly amongst Internet consumers, the survey shows that other forms of digital advertising are trusted less than ads appearing in traditional media such as TV, billboards, radio, magazines, and newspapers.
Text ads on mobile phones (43%), online banner ads (46%), online video ads (50%) and ads in search engine results (50%) are the forms of advertising least likely to elicit a degree of trust.
Source: Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey April 2009 / Base: Indian Respondents
In this context, it becomes very important to track consumer opinions online, especially in the case of experiential brands like hotels and airlines, which are not only high search categories but also categories in which the purchase decision making and even the “buying” itself has largely moved online.
Its the season for ‘cause driven‘ campaigns for brands rather than a consumerist style. While it was thought that brands would communicate about their products or company or their vision, we see an emerging trend where ‘people’s’ visions and common causes are becoming message vehicles to convey the brand message.
‘Causes‘ have become an innovative route to subliminal branding. Irrespective of what brands sell, in the metaphoric sense, they seem to want to find common ground with their customers, intermediaries and such. So what better than to connect with the audience’s causes… hope being a key in these troubled times. Case in point the Coke “hope” campaign
Some of the campaigns we are seeing in India along the same lines:
So what’s causing this phenomenon? This is what I speculate:
1. Economic meltdown is affecting all of us and brands need to remain connected. Hence messages of hope, rising, spark etc.
2. Brands wanting to be a part of people’s lives rather than people being part of brand culture
3. Brands identifying with Causes is a great way of being seen as doing good and getting the mind share
4. Most importantly, causes lend themselves to social media…else what can a brand talk or say on a facebook page???
So now traditional CSR budgets will involve subliminal branding. Perhaps thats where the spends will increase.
Internet usage in India was estimated at between 71 and 81 million in 2009. These are by any standards very conservative estimates and in any case, the numbers are growing exponentially and will leap-frog thanks to the increased access via 2G and 3G services from mobile operators.
According to IAMAI’s I-Cube 2009, at least 72% of this online population is young! 44% are students – both male and female and an additional 28% are young men in the 21-25 year age bracket.
87% are active users, accessing the internet more than once a week. In fact, almost half the users show heavy usage, accessing the internet 4-6 times a week with average usage being 15.7 hours per week.
80% use the internet to search for information! Therefore, insights derived from search analytics and listening to brand conversations in social media become key in understanding the attitudes, perceptions and changing behaviours of this new consumer.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! So, here is one that I stumbled upon recently which says in a single picture, what the changed face of today’s world is. This map was developed by Flowtown, inspired by the comic creators xkcd.com who came up with the original version in 2007.
Xkcd’s latest update, circa 2010, is not based on the actual size of the “social networks” but tries to represent the total social activity within the community – that is, how much talking, playing, sharing or other socializing happens there.
Regardless of which version one chooses to look at as a truer representation, the underlying commonality remains that it is indeed a new world order and people have migrated to social media and social networks and both in terms of numbers and in terms of activity and behaviour. Can brands afford to ignore these new world voices?
Where does one start a ‘movement’ in the social sector…with a Blog or Community? Blogging appears more reasonable as a movement is always driven by cause and a cause by knowledge and a deep understanding of the situation/problem. This understanding is the key to developing sensitivity toward the topic. And given the fact that such movements are normally ‘driven’ by one or two individuals, presumably the place to start with, if one wants to bring in more people on the same page, is the Blog.
But there are two issues that appear inconsistent. One, a Blog is an exercise in ‘expression’ of individual opinion i.e a ‘One to Many’ exercise unlike a community group/portal with a ‘Many to Many’ approach i.e the sponsor takes the role of a back seat moderator, unlike blogging.
Two, comments/feedback are at best limited to the topic itself and response is dependent on what the Blogger writes. In other words, space for exponential growth of community gets limited as the space is available for topical debates only.
Perhaps a combination approach works best. That is, start with a Blog putting forth the vision of the movement and popularize it until a critical community mass is achieved. Call this the ‘seeding’ stage. Once the momentum is reached, it may be prudent to add a Community Portal where the community actions can be coordinated in a ‘Many to Many’ format.
For example, if one wants to create a diabetics support group and extend to other disease management, then one may want to seed the community with a Blog disseminating information about causes, treatments, support and resources and then move this ‘community seed’ from the Blog to a portal, at a later ‘point in time’. The ‘point in time’ could be when the sponsors feel that critical community mass has been achieved and the initial objective of promoting the vision and concept has been achieved.
Social media research is a totally different ball game than traditional market research especially quantitative research. It is based on listening not asking questions and the base data and the setting in which it is found is completely spontaneous. It provides real time intelligence all year round.
All quantitative research is essentially based on inductive generalizations about a population after a study of a small but statistically valid sample of the same. An inductive inference means that if you take a sample of a population and expose them to a stimulus; it is possible with a certain degree of certainty to assert that the entire population will react to the same stimulus in a similar manner. In other words, an inductive generalization proceeds from a premise about a sample to a conclusion about the population. For example,
If proportion ‘X’ of the sample has an attribute abc
Then:
The same proportion ‘X’ of the population will have attribute abc.
These kinds of inductive inferences cannot be based on social media research.
Also, Social media research cannot be used as reflective or representative of anything else e.g., offline word-of-mouth. It is online word-of-mouth and attempting to understand it is more akin to data mining than statistical methods.
In fact, if at all I can compare it to traditional market research it is in its similarity to qualitative research in terms of the “buzz content” being open-ended. In fact, it does one better than qualitative research in the sense that all the comments are completely unbiased, unsolicited and therefore truly spontaneous. The setting itself is natural compared to the artificial setting of a Focus Group discussion.
To sum the differences between traditional research and social media research:
| Traditional Market Research | Social Media Research |
| Periodic Studies | All the time intelligence in real time |
| Asking questions/ moderating discussions | Listening |
| Inductive/ Reflective | Directional |
| Fieldwork | Online research |
| Statistical Tools | Search/ blog tools/ Social Media tools |
| Requires extrapolation to the population | Requires data mining and distillation |
